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Alonzo Church's Great Mathematical Logic

Church's Mathematical Logic is offered here in a rarely seen format--namely, the one that was produced, printed and distributed by the members of the class. At the end of the description is an insightful story told by Albert Tucker about the mechanics of producing such a work.

This is the Library of Congress' copy, with the original
mimeographed LC callcard laid in. +++Lecture notes of Church's class taken by
six of his graduate students (Ficken, Landau, Ruja, Singleton, Steenrod, Sweer,
Weyl) in the fall term of 1935 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at
Princeton.

The following is an interview between William Aspray and
Albert Tucker on the publication (so-called) of this work, taken from the Princeton University website on the Princeton mathematics community in the 1930's. Needless to say, Church was an enormous
influence, changing the entire face of mathematical logic. (It should be noted
to that A.M. Turing came to study with Church at Princeton and particualry in
this course in the fall of 1935.)

Tucker: "...Notes were taken, often by an assistant to the professor.
He was given the job of taking notes of the lectures, writing them up, and
having them edited by the professor. Then these would be mimeographed, and the
people in the course could for, say, a dollar or two subscribe to the notes,
which would be turned out in batches a week or two at a time. At the end, if
someone wanted to, the accumulated notes could be brought in, and we could send
them somewhere to have them bound. I think there was a charge of 25 cents for
binding. I have a whole drawer full of these notes. This is the way in which
they were bound, and these were lectures by Alonzo Church. Now these notes [showing a
set of notes] were taken cooperatively by, these are all graduate students.

Aspray: So there are six or seven people ...

Tucker: Yes, and perhaps two would
take notes at the same time and put their notes togethe., Then at another time
there would be another pair, and the duty was shared, because Church didn't
have an assistant to do this.

Aspray: I see.

Tucker: So it was either done by
an assistant, or it was done by volunteers from the class. I happen to have
been put in charge of the mimeographing machine by Dean Eisenhart when I began
as an instructor in 1933. The mimeographing machine was down in the basement of
Fine Hall. Up until that point it had been used without any supervision. The
result of this was that various things had gone wrong with the machine, and it
was decided that it had to be supervised. Somehow this supervision of the
machine turned into it being my job to coordinate all this note business. For
the running of the machine we used student labor. At that time there was a
federal program to aid students under the Works Progress Administration, an
F.D.R. program. So students could be paid for operating the mimeographing
machine, a dollar and a half an hour or something like that. The other problem
was collating. This was usually done in the common room around the large table
that was in the center of the common room. That table was large enough, more
than large enough, to serve as a ping-pong table. And I've known occasions when
it was used as a ping-pong table. The piles of page 1, page 2, page 3 would be
put around that table. Then we would collect all of the graduate students or
others around at that particular time and have a "sorting bee". A
person would simply take up a copy of page 1, move on take a copy of page 2,
and so we would circulate around the table. Each time you went around the table
you had a full copy. So the only cost for these notes was the paper and ink. We
charged enough, a dollar a copy, sometimes fifty cents a copy if the set of
notes was not very great, to cover these incidental expenses. But these notes
began to be known around the world, and we would get orders for the notes. We
would often have to take the stencils and rerun them two or three times, until
the stencils were too worn to make additional copies. We sold the copies
outside

Princeton for the cost in

Princeton plus postage. And because of this business, we actually developed an order form
that people could use to order copies. Before we realized it we were getting
into business. The first change that was made was to change from mimeographing
to lithoprinting. This was done along about 1937 or '38. There was an outfit at
that time in

Ann Arbor, Michigan
by the name of Edwards Brothers that did lithoprinting of course-notes and that
sort of thing for the whole country. They had a very efficient operation going
there. So we had the course notes lithoprinted instead of mimeographed. We had
to charge more for them, but we didn't have all the nuisance of doing it
ourselves. Also there was the problem of storage, so we got the Princeton
University Press to agree to store them for us. We gradually got them into the
business of filling orders from the outside for a 25% commission. But it still
seemed too haphazard, so in 1940 a new publication was started called Annals of
Mathematics Studies. Here is one of these early Studies. This is Study Number
Six, "The Calculi of Lambda Conversion", by

Alonzo

Church, 76 pages, $1.25. Done from
pretty straight typing, nothing fancy, and we shipped off a typed master copy
to Edwards Brothers. In due time they shipped back the number of copies that we
had ordered. The minimum order that we used in those days was 200 copies, but
it very often rose above that. They were priced so that if we sold the 200
copies we broke even. .."